I entered the Tennessee Army National Guard as an officer candidate, swearing in four days before my 35th birthday (the cutoff age to join the Army). Three months later, I left the comfort of my family and corporate law job to attend basic training at Fort Sill, Okla.

While members of my family understood the reasons that had motivated me to join the Army, several close friends and colleagues continually asked me: "Why leave your family and an established legal career for almost three months with the potential to be deployed for up to a year in order to join the Army?"

For me, the reasons were varied and deeply personal. The legacy of my family loomed large in my life. Almost every male member of my family and my mother had served in the military.

At the same time, I was strongly motivated by a deep sense of patriotism born out of my experience as a military brat, as well as the deep appreciation I developed for America as a creedal nation while studying our nation’s founding documents during law school and in legal practice.

Finally, as I reflected on my life I discovered that, while I had been blessed with so much, I mostly spent time with people who thought, acted, and lived in ways very similar to me. Certainly, I thought, being in the military would at least afford me the opportunity to interact with folks from a more diverse set of backgrounds.

What I saw at basic training was very encouraging and can only be described as a potential model for the nation in these tumultuous times. It was true diversity in action coupled with an emphasis on the importance of the unit over the individual.

The people I met were as varied as our national tapestry: from diverse faith traditions, ethnicities, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, job occupations and geographic locations -- all with varied life stories and family histories.

This included a substance abuse counselor on the front lines of the opioid crisis, a former major label recording artist, several stay-at-home moms, public school teachers, and a girl who left home at 14 to move to Europe and work as a cook before finding her calling as a combat medic.

The Army emphasized that every unit’s success was dependent on each individual in that unit; the corollary to that idea being that the failure of a single individual was a failure that belonged to the entire unit.

Whereas the national conversation on diversity has largely focused on racial diversity, the Army has managed to attract a volunteer force that is diverse across almost every imaginable metric.

While the wider culture’s emphasis on individual autonomy has often come at the expense of talking about obligation to community, the Army turns that on its head by emphasizing obligation over autonomy -- this ethos being rooted in the idea that we succeed or fail as a unit and that there is no such thing as an “individual” in the Army.

In a culture that has often sought to change the military to make it look more like the culture, it may be worth asking during these tumultuous times if there are ways in which the wider culture could change in order to reflect the values I found in today’s Army.

Greg Everett, a corporate attorney, member of the Tennessee Army National Guard, and former professional musician, lives in Nashville.